Exhibitions
ELISHEBA ISRAEL MROZIK: AN-SISTERS
NKA Gallery / 915 Buchanan St. October 1, 2022 - November 5, 2022
Elisheba Israel Mrozik
The NKA Gallery presents An-Sisters, an immersive solo exhibition by Elisheba Israel Mrozik that will be on view October 1st through November 5th 2022. This exhibition features mixed media, sculpture and installations.
This exhibition is a survey of works with each series centered in the reclamation of visual identity, at the intersection of the African diaspora and womanhood. Reimagining traditional folklores through realism, science fiction, and fantasy, Elisheba challenges not only the “white gaze” but the interior gaze of her own community; in order to express Blackness on an artistic spectrum beyond its sometimes assumed monolithic margins. "Stepping into The NKA gallery, you are greeted by a riot of jazzy bold yellows, purples, along with cool blues, and somber bronzes hung against mortar brick,” says independent curator Michael Ewing, "Selected works tower over you, transporting the viewer into mythical like scenes, while other delicate sculptures of textiles and organic materials become visual spiritual portals of interaction to lineages of matriarchal sanctum."
Elisheba Israel Mrozik is a fine artist and internationally acclaimed tattooist. Mrozik graduated from Memphis College of Art in 2006 with a BFA in Computer Arts. After moving to Nashville, TN in 2007, she freelanced her artistic skills and in 2011 discovered tattooing, becoming the first licensed Black artist in Middle Tennessee. Mrozik says this exhibition is, for her, a kind of cultural inheritance for the modern Black artist, willed to her through ancestral energy that, like all energy, cannot be created nor destroyed, only transformed and shifted
